Clare (Teresa Palmer) has come to Berlin from Australia for
all the usual reasons. She’s in search of ‘those life experiences people are
talking about all the time’, but at first it seems as if she’ll only find the
kind of experiences that people actually have: solitary sightseeing, aimless
tat-browsing in ‘vintage’ stalls, smoking joints on the roof of her hostel.

Fortunately, she’s going to end up having the kind of ‘life
experience’ that young travellers have in movies. Unfortunately, that
experience is less like one from Before
Sunrise and more like one from Hostel.

Andi is the tall dark stranger that Clare might have been
hoping to bump into. He’s sexy, intense and courteous; maybe a little OCD, but
that’s just Germans for you, right? In any case, Clare allows herself to be led
back to a hipsterish flat in an otherwise empty housing block. Sensitive Andi’s
bedroom style turns out a little forceful, surprisingly but not unappealingly,
and in the morning he leaves for work.

Somehow he forgets to give Clare the key to the incredibly
ominous security bar across his front door, so she’s stuck indoors until he
gets back from work. This isn’t so bad – even if he did it deliberately, it’s
nice to feel wanted – but when it happens the next morning too, Clare starts to
panic. She’s right to.

Shortland could have made a clammy, frantic thriller if she’d
kept the film focused on Clare, and Palmer certainly seems more than able to
carry a chamber piece by herself. But Berlin
Syndrome ends up following Andi for whole stretches at the cost of tension.

It seems that the film is trying to explain its villain
(think Norman Bates with a thing for toenails), or to say something profound
about the country he lives in. Shortland’s previous film was the dazzling Lore, an adaptation of Rachel Seiffert’s
novella about the daughter of a Nazi officer, and Berlin Syndrome touches on the subject of knowing and forgetting in
Germany’s history; at least, a copy of WG Sebald’s Austerlitz makes an appearance. But the tawdry story of
imprisonment and abuse is not elevated or deepened by the proximity of
prize-winning fiction. It needed to absorb literary ideas rather than merely
nod at them.

As always, Shortland does marvels with texture and sound.
Her close-ups of the human body in particular – whooshing eyelashes, rasping of
hangnails, hair scrunched by scissors – evoke the dual allure and horror of
physical contact with strangers. But while Berlin
Syndrome is visually arresting and tonally interesting, it remains
psychologically flat and thematically unfocused.